EasyInstall Experience Reports

Feel free to edit this page to add your successes and problems installing packages with EasyInstall. Please try to keep the lists in alphabetic order, for the convenience of people who are looking to see if success has already been reported for a particular package.

NOTE: If you received a "Could not find distribution" message, please check the PyPI listing for the package before reporting it broken. If neither the Home Page nor Download URL links go directly to pages that contain links to the package's distribution files, you will need to download the package directly. Please contact the package's author directly, and ask them to update their PyPI information to include a current home page and download page. Packages distributed via Sourceforge should have a "Download URL" pointing to their project's "showfiles.php" page.

Note also that EasyInstall does not follow links on "This project has moved" redirection pages; please ask the author to fix their PyPI entries!

Note that some packages (including ones listed above) contain other information besides Python packages in their distribution files, such as documentation, scripts, sample data, etc. These other files are not installed by EasyInstall, so if you want to access them, you will need to download the distribution, and then give its filename to Easy Install to do the installation. You can then extract and use any other files you need direct from the original distribution.)

If you are responsible for any of the following packages, please consider making changes so that your downstream users can use EasyInstall to install them. If you're a user of one of these packages, please consider contributing a patch to the package's authors to make them compatible.

easyinstall/ez_setup

On Windows XP behind a SOCKS & HTTP proxy, I essentially failed to install setuptools or easyinstall. The ez_setup script tries to connect to the Internet and times out while it can't. I manually downloaded setuptools-0.6a11-py2.4.egg and placed it in the same folder as ez_setup.py. In such case I would expect that it would just "unegg" and install that file but it didn't. So I found myself in a typical chicken-and-egg problem: in order to be able to install another .egg file, I have to install an .egg file. I would very much prefer if easyinstall did not use easyinstall itself but relied on a simple disutils setup.py. Or even better, there could be an .exe installer for setuptools so that users don't have to struggle to install setuptools.

I worked around this by replacing "to_dir=tmpdir" with "to_dir=os.curdir" in line 161 of ez_setup.py and it worked. I believe the ez_setup.py should first look in the current folder and only then in the temp folder for an existing .egg.

I got this to work by setting the environment var "http_proxy". On winxp that was

set http_proxy=http://user:password@proxy:port

Another windows issue (Windows XP and Windows 2003 SBE) easy_install fails to find the python executable because python is installed in c:program filesPython25 (or some other path with spaces I'd assume). It returns "Cannot find Python executable C:Program". But since it's an executable file I can't figure out where its reading the directory from. So while you can install using ez_setup fine, it won't find eggs once installed.

Yet another Windows experience. I had just installed python 2.5 on a machine with python 2.4, and updated PATH and PYTHONPATH to refer to the new installation. Next step was to download and run ez_setup.py. I wasn't sure where I should put it; I put it in 2.5's site-packages. Running ez_setup.py seemed to work fine, but afterwards easy_install always produced "ImportError: No module named pkg_resources". I moved ez_setup.py up to C:/Python25, ran it again, and now easy_install is happy. It looks like ez_setup.py should not be saved to and run from site-packages.

Same initial conditions (more or less, i.e., had just re-installed 2.5), same symptoms, even after moving ez_setup.py out of site-packages; turned out the problem was I didn't even have a PYTHONPATH environment variable defined at all! Defined it to be C:Python25 and now everything's working as advertised.

A Windows x64 problem: I've installed the Python 2.5 64 bit version for Windows. I downloaded ez_setup.py and ran it. Now when I'm trying to use it (just the easy_install binary with no arguments) I get this error message:

Cannot find Python executable C:\Python25\python.exe

Well, my python.exe is exactly on that path. Can this be a 32/64 bit issue? I.e. a 32-bit application trying to invoke a 64-bit application.

ll-sisyphus-0.10.1

Author's name in package metadata includes an 8-bit character, which can't be written to PKG-INFO file

And add the appropriate package_data argument to setup() in setup.py . -- Robert Kern

ModelingCore-0.9-pre-17.1

complains about cheetah-template not being found, and requires you to "Press ENTER to Continue". Apart from this, appears to install correctly. (The templates are intended to be compiled to .py files, which are then installed as part of the normal setup() process. But, it comes with pre-compiled versions of the templates, so it works fine except for the "press enter" thing.)

PEAK-0.5a4dev_r2085

peaktest fails with an "IOError: [Errno 20] Not a directory" because RuleDispatch-0.5a0dev_r2083, an egg on which PEAK depends, installs as a zip, and the version of docutils included in PEAK isn't zip module savvy. Unzipping the RuleDispatch egg works around the problem.

PIL 1.1.5

The package name is actually Imaging. Use the following command line to install it

Install works, but fails to install /usr/local/include/python2.3/pygame/* so other C modules from other projects won't compile.

ReportLab-1.20

setup.py is in a third-level directory. Also, it tries to second-guess install locations, so even if it ran, it would require some hacking of its data file path munging code in setup.py. This would probably work fine if it were changed to use the de-facto standard hack for distutils.command.install_data, used by other packages to install data in their package directories.

SpreadModule-1.5

needs Spread include files already present/installed (might work if so)

scipy_core

Despite being listed on Cheese Shop, I can't get scipy_core to play. I have scipy_core 0.7.1.1517 installed from my own svn checkout, but doing pkg_resources.require("scipy_core") results in pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: scipy-core and pkg_resources.require("scipy") results in pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: scipy. I suspect this is because the distribution scipy_core actually installs a package named scipy. (But this doesn't explain whey pkg_resources.require("scipy") fails.) Is there some documentation about how pkg_resources actually finds packages? I want to allow other packages to say install-requires=['scipy_core>=0.6']

transitfeed

I'm the maintainer of the dist. We had a py2exe binary list at http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/ with the name transitfeed-1.0.7-windows.zip and source dist in transitfeed-1.0.7.tar.gz. easy_install running in linux downloaded the zip instead of the tar.gz on the project homepage and the tar.gz on PyPI. It would be nice if easy_install was a little more clever in def find(req). For example, if two files look like the some version take the one on the index page. When not running on windows try to avoid .zip files. A guide to naming files to best avoid false matches would be nice.

turtle2.py

The name of the package isn't parseable, I guess: http://www.python.org/pypi/turtle2.py/1.0.0 (well, the package isn't actually setup with distutils; but easy_install bails out before it gets that far. Maybe PyPI should reject names like that.

Twisted-2.0.1

setup aborts, demanding that zope.interface be installed (maybe they will replace w/egg dependency in future?)

I'm guessing the extra_path part causes problems. It gets installed with no ZopePageTemplate package, instead it's all top-level packages. Well, maybe eggs are actually doing the right thing; but I've become so used to using --install-lib=... to install packages, and the ZopePageTemplates.pth statements gets ignored in that case, that I expect it to be contained in a package even though the setup file isn't really saying to do that. Hrm.

(PJE: This installer is hideously broken, as it aliases its contained packages onto sys.path; the correct and documented way to specify the behavior the author apparently desires would be:

without specifying an extra_path. This format would work fine with EasyInstall, but unfortunately EasyInstall cannot work around broken setup scripts. :(

Maybe the user should be advised that under Linux it should run easy_install.py instead of easy_install. Also the script easy_install.pyc gets installed into /usr/bin, it should be installed without execute mode or else when we are using bash it will appear in the $PATH.

Under Debian - and its derivatives - the package python-devmust be installed.

The user should also be explain that usually easy_install.py must be run with root previleges.

When building with MinGW/msys on Windows, I've always found that to compile/install source Python packages with C extensions, I need to do:

python setup.py build -cmingw32
python setup.py install --skip-build

EasyInstall doesn't know that that's required, and as such, I can't put together any eggs with C extensions.

As an example, I tried to EasyInstall the up-to-the-minute PEAK tarball, and got:

Downloading c:/temp/PEAK.tar.gz
Installing PEAK.tar.gz
error: Setup script exited with error: Python was built with version 7.1 of Visual Studio,
and extensions need to be built with the same version of the compiler, but it isn't installed.

That's the same error I get with any source C extension that I try to build with a standard setup.py install, and is the reason I need to compile in two steps as shown above

-- JayParlar

Jay, you need to edit your c:/Python2x/Lib/distutils/distutils.cfg file, and put the following into it:

[build]
compiler = mingw32

The distutils will then know that's what compiler you use, and you won't need to do two steps, with or without EasyInstall. (By the way, setup.py files can take multiple commands, so you could also have been using "python setup.py build -cmingw32 install" and you wouldn't have needed the --skip-build; that's the recipe I used to use before I found out about distutils.cfg. Anyway, builds that are run under EasyInstall support all the normal ways to specify distutils options, including the configuration files. See also the docs on Distutils Configuration Files in Python's manual for Installing Python Modules.

On debian there is the policy of putting packages managed by dpkg/apt in /usr and locally installed stuff in /usr/local. python on debian therefor creates a /usr/local/pythonX.Y/site-packages for locally installed packages. When I use ez_install.py to install easyinstall or easy_install.py I would have to specifiy --install-dir and --script-dir each time to follow the policy. Any ideas how we can make it install in the right place with extra args? -- Myers Carpenter 2005-07-21T16:35:25

So apparently I need to install the optparse module, which would have to be in a custom installation location since I'm not root, in order to install modules in custom installation locations. Catch-22. Am I missing something? My host (he.net) has python 2.2.3 installed, and I do not have control over when they upgrade.

(Your problem is that you have Python 2.2, which is not supported. Setuptools requires Python 2.3 or better, with 2.3.5 being preferred.)

This means that SELinux will not allow python to use these files. It is common for users to edit files in their home directory or tmp directories and then move (mv) them to system directories. The problem is that the files end up with the wrong file context which confined applications are not allowed to access.

Allowing Access

If you want python to access this files, you need to relabel them using restorecon -v /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Amara-1.2.0.2-py2.5.egg. You might want to relabel the entire directory using restorecon -R -v /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages.

I guess this could happen with easy_install on any package in a Fedora system?
No mention of it whilst installing?
Might be good to let users know.

The magic .exe wrapper files tend to get in the way on these platforms. I would find it easier to use setuptools if they were not there at all.

The problem is that those .exe wrapper files need to run as admin, even though the installation script usually doesn't need those rights. That means confirming every action. Even worse, when you run an executable as admin from a shell, it gets launched into its own process, thus creating a new window. When it terminates, it takes its window with it.

Therefore, you never get to see any command-line output - the widow closes as soon as it appears.

As such, the .exe wrappers are entirely unusable. Unfortunately, they take over the easy-to-type names. Is it possible to make the .exe wrappers only elevate to admin privs when they need them (which is never, in my experience so far)?

Because I can't use the .exe wrappers, I run into another problem. Fixing those wrappers would probably hide the problem below again.

It is hard to override the Windows approach to discovering which application to use to launch a particular document. If I always and only wanted one Python install, then I can (and do) just add .py to the cmdspec env variable. Because .py is associated with my system Python, then I can just type

scriptname args

at the shell & it'll run

python.exe path\to\scriptname.py args

(Sometimes I have to fix up the open command for .py files so that it'll pass those args along.)

However, I don't know of any good solution when I'm running multiple Pythons (via virtualenv). Short of PowerShell, there isn't a good way to change which python will be used to run .py files (in the registry). And when you just run a script, Windows chooses the executable, based on the registry.

Does anyone have any good idea how to get multiple virtualenvs to work on Windows, without having to type python fullpathtoscript.py every time?

I installed python-sybase 0.39 (found on sourceforge, not automatically installed) on Solaris with Python 2.5.2 and setuptools 0.6c8. It made a single file called python_sybase-0.39-py2.5-solaris-2.10-sun4u.egg in the site-packages directory.

Later, a user found that his software was not compatible with the latest python-sybase, so he tried to point his PYTHONPATH at a directory that contained an older version. It kept picking up the newer version, though and he eventually asked me to remove the new version from the system so he could get his program to work.

The problem turns out to be that something puts all the .egg files on sys.path AHEAD of the directories that are in PYTHONPATH. Consequently, PYTHONPATH can never override them.

I found that I could make it work by 1) removing the .egg file from site-packages, or 2) altering sys.path from my python program before doing the import.